Online backup has emerged as an alternative to management of onsite backup for many enterprises. Online backup providers store enterprise data offsite, usually for a capacity-based fee. The number of vendors supplying online backup services is vast and growing steadily. There are several important factors enterprises must keep in mind when considering integrating online backup into their storage strategy:
- Privacy. With new privacy laws and compliance regulations, data security has grown in significance over the past few years. Each enterprise will have to decide on the viability of handing over all company data to a third party. Ensure that vendors can live up to enterprise privacy, security and compliance concerns before putting them on the shortlist.
- Pricing. There are innumerable vendors occupying the space and just as many pricing plans. The services across vendors are essentially the same, so Info-Tech recommends going with the best price as long as all compliance requirements can be met by the vendor.
- Speed. Don't expect online service providers to speed up enterprise backups. Both the enterprise bandwidth speed and the size of the files being backed up will affect the time it takes to complete backups and restores. Some Info-Tech clients have indicated taking days to backup less than 30GB of data.
- Availability. All vendors guarantee a certain amount of availability, for example, 99.9% uptime. However, there have been several examples of online backup providers being offline; one example is the Amazon S3 eight-hour outage in July, 2008. It is strongly recommended that online backup be used as part of a redundancy plan rather than primary storage.
